Alt-right provocateur to dress up as 'mattress girl' for Columbia speech

When he speaks at Columbia University next week, alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos plans to dress up as Emma Sulkowicz, the alumna who carried her mattress around campus to protest the university's sexual assault policies.

Sulkowicz said she would carry the mattress until a student she accused of rape, but whom the university had cleared, left campus or was expelled. "Carry that Weight," her senior arts thesis and protest, generated international headlines, earned her awards, and aroused Internet-mediated hostility. The student she accused, Paul Nungesser, has since sued the university and her thesis adviser, but not her. Both graduated in 2015.

"He is dressing in drag as me? And carrying a mattress? He'll get a sense of how it feels. That's fantastic. I hope he carries a real one, and doesn't cop out with an air mattress," Sulkowicz wrote in an email to POLITICO New York.

Columbia's college Republicans are scheduled to host Yiannopoulos on campus next week, on Nov. 16. (The sold-out event was initially open to the public, but the student club later "voided" non-Columbia registrants. "Practically, we can’t have people in if they don’t have a Columbia ID," club creative director Elizabeth Hiss said in a phone interview.)

Yiannopoulos is a controversial figure. He was banned from Twitter for "inciting ... harassment" of black actress Leslie Jones; other famous exploits included entering a lecture hall on a litter carried by men wearing "Make America Great Again" baseball caps and planning a college scholarship for "white men who wish to pursue their post-secondary education on equal footing with their female, queer and ethnic minority classmates."

He is currently speaking at many American universities on his "Dangerous Faggot Tour." He had been scheduled stop at New York University the day after Columbia, on Nov. 17, but the university preemptively canceled the event, alluding to security concerns.

Columbia confirmed that the event would go forward, and that the administration had no plans to cancel it. ("[The] University cannot and will not rule any subject or form of expression out of order on the ground that it is objectionable, offensive, immoral, or untrue," according to the university rules of conduct. "We don't ban speech," university president Lee Bollinger wrote in a recent essay.)

Yiannopoulos's plans were first divulged by Christina Hoff Sommers, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, who spoke at Columbia last week and who has shared the stage with Yiannopoulos at past events, but said she does not anymore.

"He's coming here, and he's dressing in drag, and I don't want to tell you what he's coming as," she said, at an event sponsored by Columbia's libertarian and Republican clubs. "OK, if you insist: Mattress girl. He's bringing a mattress."

"I told him not to do it, but he doesn't listen," she said, provoking groans mixed with applause.

In a subsequent phone interview, she expressed mixed feelings about his plans.

"It’s so incorrect, beyond words. It’ll be the mother of all triggerings," she said. "Milo is outrageous, and sometimes deplorable. He’s also wickedly funny."